


Summertime Record

by mizael



Category: One Piece
Genre: ASL Brothers, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Domestic, Fluff, Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-05-08
Updated: 2016-05-08
Packaged: 2018-06-07 02:10:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6781105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mizael/pseuds/mizael
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Ace, Sabo, and Luffy live in a small apartment together in the heart of Washington, DC and lead separate lives but, at the end of the day, come back home to each other.</p>
<p>(or: ASL, and adventures in domesticity)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Summertime Record

**Author's Note:**

> washington dc is my home so i'm obviously biased for the city haha......  
> but it gives sabo the chance to get a lobbyist job since i didnt know where i wanted him to work
> 
> i hope you enjoy my series of domestic asl??! ;u;  
> the title comes from [one my favorite songs](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avDcNHGb_tc) from kagepro
> 
> (sabo has a really bad ~~luffy~~ brother complex)

Sabo gets back from a particularly long dinner with another snooty senator to find Ace and Luffy wrestling in front of the TV stand, the contents of their meticulously clean games shelf tipped and spilled all over the floor.

“Oh! Sabo! Welcome home!”

He pinches the bridge of his nose and closes his eyes.

He counts to ten.

“What happened?”

“Ace wouldn’t share the last piece of his food!” Luffy somehow manages to untangle himself from the headlock that Ace has him in and pushes Ace face-first into the floor, despite the older man’s shouting, and beams brightly at Sabo still standing there in his three piece suit and dress shoes. “But then I managed to eat it anyway!”

“Steal it, you mean!” Ace, not to be outdone, quickly flips them again before they descend into another wrestling match, rolling all over the scattered game cases until they hit the wall with a loud _thud_ , followed by dual groans of pain.

Sabo can’t begin to feel even remotely sympathetic.

“You tipped over the games shelf. Again,” he steps out of his shoes and places them gently on the rack next to the door before making his way further into the apartment. There’s a low wall that separates the kitchen and the living room, and Sabo finds evidence of their food match splattered on the side. “ _Ace_.”

“I didn’t do it!” is the immediate response, despite Ace still groaning in pain on the floor and rubbing the back of his head where a small bruise has formed from his collision with the wall. “Whatever it was, I didn’t do it!”

“I didn’t say you did, but you still contributed to it so you have to clean it up,” Sabo blows a piece of hair from his face and sighs before putting the plastic bag in his hands on the table. “And the shelf, too.”

“But Luffy started it!” Ace jabs an accusing finger at the equally sulking teenager next to him, and Sabo has to remind himself that Ace is twenty-three and a grown man who has a steady job and works out on his days off. He really has to, though he’s starting to want to deny that such a thing happens just so Ace can have some sort of excuse and Sabo’s expectations of maturity have no basis.

Alas.

Sabo sighs again and crosses his arms. “Luffy, you have to—”

“But Saboooo,” Luffy brings his teary eyes up to lock gazes with his and Sabo suddenly feels extremely guilty for something he hasn’t even done. “I was just hungry!”

His younger brother knows how to play him like a fiddle.

“You’re always hungry!” Ace places a well-aimed smack on the back of Luffy’s head, and the two look ready to go at it once more when Luffy sticks his tongue out in response.

“No, Luffy’s right,” Sabo says, interrupting the two of them. “Ace, you have to clean up. Luffy was just a bit hungry, and doesn’t deserve to be put in a headlock.”

“But Saboooo,” Ace whines with the same withering pout and teary eyes.

“No, it’s not cute when you do it.”

“Wow, okay, I see how it is.”

Ace grumbles some more but gets up from his spot on the floor to find a towel in the kitchen to begin scrubbing off the meat juice stains from the wall, muttering incoherently about Sabo’s embarrassing little brother complex and Sabo pretends he doesn’t hear it (though if he trips Ace on his way out of the kitchen, well, it was an accident).

He gives instructions on how to best remove food from the wall before he has Luffy at least put back the game cases that he knocked over in his bout with Ace. Embarrassing little brother complex or not, Sabo still doesn’t want to clean up that mess. His “dinner date” (as Ace loves to tease him about) was more of a chore than a relaxing dinner in an upscale restaurant so he’s understandably tired, but Sabo supposes that’s the price he pays for trying to campaign to a brick wall.

The senator hadn’t budged, only offered a condescending smile and a vague ‘maybe’ in regards to the bill that Sabo was trying to lobby, and just thinking about it makes Sabo want to rip his hair out in frustration.

Senators. Noblemen. They are all the same, in the end.

“Sabo!” he hears Luffy’s voice carry through the apartment as soon as he gets his shirt and tie off. “What’s in the bag? It smells really good!”

“Hang on!” he shouts back, picking a random sweater from the closet to pull on. No matter how much Ace and Luffy like to parade around the house half-naked (or, sometimes after a shower, _fully naked_ ), Sabo liked to be decent, thank you very much. He shucks off his slacks for sweatpants and then quickly makes his way back to the kitchen-dining-living room junction.

He’s pleasantly surprised to find the living room mostly clean now, with only a few game cases littering the ground, unlike how much the floor was _absolutely covered_ not even fifteen minutes ago.

“It smells like cake. Did you bring cake home?” Ace walks out from the kitchen too, wiping his wet hands on the fabric of his pants. Luffy looks about ready to tear the plastic open just at the mere mention of cake and Sabo chuckles.

“I wanted it to be a surprise,” he sighs dramatically, but smiles and takes the box out from the bag. It’s a neat little white box with a blue stripe around the bottom and a small ship cruising on top as if the line is the ocean. The words ‘The Baratie’ are printed in simple font.

“Sanji’s cakes! Sanji’s cake!” Luffy’s mouth starts watering and he casts such a look of worship on Sabo that Sabo feels his heart start beating faster from the sheer brightness of it and immediately wraps Luffy in a tight hug with a barely muffled noise of excitement.

“Luffy!” he could never stay mad at Luffy for long, no matter what he did. “It’s okay, I’ll save the second-biggest slice of cake for you.”

“Thank you, Sabo!” and Luffy wiggles out from Sabo’s grip to turn back to the cake. And then: “Wait, second-biggest? I want the biggest slice!”

“No, you can’t have it,” Sabo unfolds the paper box and pushes the contents forward to Ace instead. “Ace gets the biggest slice.”

It’s a relatively small two-tiered cake compared to their huge appetites, but Sabo finds it just as charming as if it were big. There’s a lot of frosting flowers splayed across the entirety of it, most of them fire poppies, and there are even crystallized candy flames on the very top.

_Happy birthday, Ace._

“Eh? But we celebrated Ace’s birthday yesterday?” Luffy blinks after he reads the candy lettering, looking up at Sabo who is still smiling fondly.

“I-I wanted to, um,” Sabo feels himself flush from the sheer embarrassment beginning to encompass him, and Ace’s look of dawning realization helps him somewhat.

They had indeed had a huge party yesterday, with everyone from Ace’s firefighting department showing up to congratulate him on turning twenty-three and then proceeding to sing loud karaoke into the night. The Whitebeard Firefighters, as they called themselves (even if they actually belonged to the city and not their sponsor, Edward Newgate), were a rowdy bunch. Their neighbors had given up on noise complaints rather quickly, and Sanji had even brought in some Baked Alaska to give to Ace to set on fire for the finishing touches before it was served.

“I know we had a party with everyone yesterday, but I was hoping we could have one again today,” he shakes the memory off and gives another smile to Ace, who looks torn between hugging him or punching him in the face. Maybe both. That's always a good sign. “You know, just the three of us.”

“You don't need to do that,” Ace speaks up rather quickly, stuffing his hands in the pockets of his pajama pants and avoiding eye contact with Sabo. “Yesterday was good.”

“But… this is good, too,” it's Luffy who speaks up this time, an impossibly wide smile on his face as he links elbows with his two older brothers and then drags them in closer to the cake. “Just the three of us! Like old times!”

Sabo can't help the smile that stretches on his own face, because Luffy’s happiness is always contagious, and Ace grunts something like approval but Sabo can see the edges of his lips twitching too. There’s no hiding anything about their baby brother.

“Yeah, yeah, let's just cut the cake and eat, okay?” Ace exits the dining room and into the kitchen, coming out with a cake knife in his hands that he shoves to Sabo. “Here. Cut the cake.”

“But the birthday boy should be the one doing this.”

“It was your idea.”

“An idea for you.”

“Hey—”

Sabo and Ace blink once, before looking at the spot between them that used to hold one Monkey D. Luffy. _Used to_ being the keyword, because he's not there anymore, and both of them feel a sense of dread in their stomachs before they turn towards the cake.

It's gone.

And Luffy is facing away from them, chewing slowly as if doing so wouldn't make them notice him.

“Luffy…” Ace starts slowly.

“Mmm!”

“Come here, you bottomless pit!” Ace is already vaulting over the low wall separating the kitchen and the living room, and Luffy shrieks in surprise, laughing loudly as Ace chases him around the room again. Thankfully, they don’t knock into anything this time. Luffy trips and smashes face-first into the sofa, but then just as quickly gets back up to avoid a deep lunge by Ace only a second after.

They chase each other for a while before Luffy makes a mad dash for Sabo before he can even register what's happening, and then all of a sudden Ace crashes into them and sends the three of them tumbling to the floor in a mess of Sabo’s surprised yelp and Luffy’s loud laughter.

“That was my birthday cake, Luffy!” Ace whines, face pressed against Sabo’s shoulder and his legs haphazardly splayed across Luffy’s chest. None of them make a move to get up from the pile of limbs they’ve become.

“But you had cake yesterday too!” Luffy pouts, though Sabo can’t see it from his vantage. He just assumes.

“We can just get another one tomorrow,” Sabo plays mediator again. “For now, can you guys get off me? You’re so heavy.”

“No,” it’s Ace who says it this time, shifting so he can wrap his arms around Sabo’s frame, before he’s quickly joined by Luffy on the other side and Sabo can’t get up from his position at all. Or even roll over with Luffy attached to him. “S’bo’s not going anywhere.”

“I’m not going—hey, did you fall asleep? Hey! Ace! You’re heavy!”

“Ace is right! Sabo’s comfortable and warm and shouldn’t go anywhere. Let’s all just sleep on Sabo!” Luffy cheers and curls up even closer to Sabo, taking the side that Ace doesn’t occupy. While Sabo is over the moon at this, he also wants to sleep in a real bed.

“You can’t sleep on me, I have work in the morning unlike you two. Hey, _Luffy_ , hey—”

“Sabo?” Ace’s voice is muffled and groggy, but he can feel a smile against his shoulder.

“Yeah?”

“... Thanks.”

Sabo (not really) reluctantly sighs and wraps both of his brothers up with his arms. “We’re brothers after all, right? I’m glad you’ve been born. I’m happy for your birthday every year. Let’s have as good of a year as we possibly can, okay?”

“You’re such a sap.”

“Says the one who can’t even look at me when he thanks me.”

“Hey!”

“Shishishi,” Luffy’s laugh is muffled, too, his face buried into Sabo’s other shoulder. “I’m also happy Ace is alive. It’s easier when Ace is around.”

“I hate you guys,” Ace groans, rolling off of Sabo and staring at the ceiling above them as they’re tangled together on the floor.

“Nuh-uh!” Luffy looks up and beams another smile. “Ace loves us.”

“You’re embarrassing.”

“Hey, Luffy,” Sabo sits up, Luffy still clinging to his side, and gives his younger sibling a mischievous smile. “We should show Ace how much we love him.”

Ace makes a choked noise, before he’s up on his feet and trying to run back to his room, but both Sabo and Luffy manage to grab his ankle and pile on top of him next, laughing all the while.

_Happy birthday, Ace_.

The January snow outside, the warmth of their body heat inside, and Ace’s ever-growing fondness for his birthday is how they should always the start the new year.

Together.


End file.
